Reporting to the Senate Judiciary Committee for an oversight
hearing Wednesday morning, Mr. Holder said Swartz’s January suicide
was “a tragedy” but that the Justice Department acted appropriately
throughout the prosecution.

The Obama administration pursuit of Swartz, said Holder,
demonstrated “a good use of
prosecutorial discretion."

Swartz, 26, took his own life earlier this year months before he
was expected to stand trial in a controversial federal case that
carried a potential 35 year sentence if a conviction was
returned.

Holder touched briefly on the hacktivist after Sen. John Cornyn
(R-Texas) asked him on Wednesday to address allegations that the
Justice Department harassed Swartz in order to have him plea to
lesser offenses. The Obama administration has been accused of
“trying to bully someone into pleading guilty to something,”
Sen. Cornyn said, a claim to which the country’s top attorney
refuted.

According to Holder, Swartz was presented with an option that
would have left him escaping heavy sentencing in lieu of much more
lenient punishment. Had Swartz accepted an offer from the Justice
Department, Holder says he could have been sentenced to serve for
no longer than a few months. The Justice Department never intended
for Swartz to go to jail "for longer than a three, four,
potentially five-month range," Holder said.

Asked by Cornyn if he thought the Massachusetts district
attorney demonstrated prosecutorial overreach or misconduct in the
Swartz case, Holder said, "I don't look at what necessarily was
charged as much as what was offered in terms of how the case might
have been resolved.”

Prosecutors say Swartz entered a utility closet at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and attempted to
download millions of academic articles hosted on the website JSTOR.
He was charged with gaining unauthorized access to a protected
device under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and

Following the activist’s death, Massachusetts US Attorney Carmen
Ortiz was accused of acting overzealously in prosecuting
Swartz for merely accessing scholarly articles. She responded by
saying that her office’s conduct was appropriate in handling the
case.

“As federal prosecutors, our mission includes protecting the
use of computers and the Internet by enforcing the law as fairly
and responsibly as possible. We strive to do our best to fulfill
this mission every day,” she wrote. “The career prosecutors
handling this matter took on the difficult task of enforcing a law
they had taken an oath to uphold, and did so reasonably.”

One month after Swartz passed away, the Huffington Post ran a
report in which they claimed congressional staffers were told by the
Justice Department that the activist’s “Guerilla Open Access
Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution. Swartz had co-authored
the document and had posted it on his personal blog.

“I really need to know and Aaron’s family needs to know who
made the decisions here. Who decided to prosecute him like this and
why,” Swartz's partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, told RT.
“The testimony of these Justice Department officials to Congress
points to the direction of this being a political prosecution
because of his views on copyright and his views on political
freedom.”

Swartz co-founded the website Reddit and also started the
advocacy group Demand Progress, an organization that was
instrumental in garnering opposition against the Stop Online Piracy
Act, or SOPA, in 2012.